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When 'Japan's Art Opened to Western Winds

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''PARIS IN JAPAN: The Japanese Encounter With European Painting'' may be the sleeper of the season. It arrived at the Japan Society Gallery without fanfare and without great paintings. What it brings is a fresh perspective on both Paris and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And in a catalogue indispensable to the exhibition, there is an eye-opening essay by J. Thomas Rimer that places the art - and the present moment - in context.

The title of the exhibition suggests that something has been turned on its head. The influence of Japan on 19th-century French art is well known. The down-to-earth subjects, flat spaces and unexpected points of view of Japanese prints left an indelible mark on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

The exhibition reveals that Parisian art had an even more decisive effect on Japan. When the Emperor Meiji came to power in 1868, his Government brought to an end more than 200 years of self-imposed Japanese isolation. Partly in disgust with the corruption and ineptness of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which ended in years of turbulence bordering on civil war, there was a reaction against tradition.

Under a Government driven to turn Japan overnight into a competitive international power, Japanese artists were thrown into the world in a sudden, almost violent way. Partly because oil painting was identified with ''scientific'' realism at a time when Japan was trying to make itself a scientific and technological power, European painting was considered superior to brush and ink.

Japanese artists turned, above all, to Paris, the capital of painting and cultural champion of the world. It is easy to understand the appeal of the City of Light to a country that had just emerged from years of insulation and darkness. It may have been a long and costly journey to Paris, the French language may have been hard and Parisian life may not always have been accommodating, but for most Japanese artists, the trouble was worth it. The romance with Paris was real and sustaining.

Mr. Rimer, an East Asian literary scholar, points out that in a Japan where national models had crumbled, ''all of Western art came to serve as their avant-garde.'' The Japanese learned from such academic painters as Raphael Collin, Jean-Paul Laurens, Fernand Cormon and Carolus-Duran. And they learned from the art and lives of Cezanne, van Gogh and Gauguin. If it was French, it was good. All French art was an alternative.

When European art began to question its own traditions, however, as it did increasingly during and after World War I, there was a potential for trouble. Artists could find themselves with neither a European tradition to learn from nor a Japanese tradition to hold onto. When Saeki Yuzo, who is perceived in his country as a tragic hero, the Japanese van Gogh, died at the age of 30 in an insane asylum in Paris in 1928 - perhaps a suicide -he had been trying to paint in this void. Saeki continues to be an example to Japanese artists abroad of the difficulties in reconciling East and West.

The exhibition proceeds chronologically from 1890, when Paris became the model for art in Japan, through the 1930's, when more and more Japanese artists were encountering French art through word of mouth and reproductions and European art was being approached in a less systematic way. All 77 paintings were borrowed from institutions in Japan. Several have been given the designation ''Important Cultural Property'' by the Japanese Government, an indication of the regard the Japanese have for their encounter with European art.

The paintings are limited and fascinating. No matter how academic or how radical the Western sources, the results tend to be earnest and discreet. The Japanese feeling for line and surface, earth and sky, is clear. There is little interest in movement and weight. Some street scenes, landscapes and interiors are almost Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and School of Paris imitations. Portraits depend upon a centralized European structure. Japanese artists were generally uneasy with the nude: there was no tradition for them to draw on as there was in Western art. They were also uncomfortable with the literalness of history painting. No painting in the show has the pictorial and narrative sweep of Japanese scrolls.

The clash of cultures can be felt in other ways. There is a pervasive melancholy resulting from the blend of explicit, realistic technique, muted color and a tendency toward self-effacement. Figures in portraits can seem trapped. Even when forms suggest the geometry of Cezanne and brushwork is modeled on van Gogh, the energy is restrained. The effort to assimilate Western art appears to have been so paramount that differences between East and West had to be repressed or denied. It was not until the 1930's, when a militaristic Government that would eventually all but crush the avant-garde was settling into power, that the clash of cultures became a consistent spark.

The key figure of the first part of the show is Kuroda Seiki. In 1896, after nine years in Paris, he was appointed director of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts's Western painting section. Kuroda helped bring into Japanese art an academic realism and an Impressionist means of painting light. His work is delicate, with a feeling for the human figure. When he painted a woman holding a man's hand and leaning on his shoulder, he brought into Japanese painting an easy intimacy. His problems in drawing arms and hands were passed on and shared by other artists in the show.

The next generation of Japanese painters was influenced by more radical artistic developments in France. Yorozu Tetsugoro's ''Self-Portrait With Red Eyes,'' dated 1912, was painted at a time when evidence of European avant-gardes began to pour into Japan. With his droopy, vigilant eyes, this disheveled, defiant, self-conscious figure, part Cubist, part Expressionist, both confronting us and pinned to the red background, reflects the kind of determination and introspection typical of Japanese painting at the time. In self-portraits by other artists, as well, there is a will and confidence that artists of the previous generation did not have.

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Saeki Yuzo went to Paris with his family in 1924. His paintings reflect his isolation. His cafe windows and stores are filled with signs, some illegible. In his ''Snowy Landscape,'' figures are on the verge of illegibility. His signs seem like scars of an internal pressure to resolve a conflict between the independence and picturesque subject matter of Paris and a dependence upon his native calligraphic and woodcut tradition.

In the last part of the show, 1930-1940, the pictorial emphasis is less on studying European models and more on putting them in the service of self-expression. In the ''Nude With Fans,'' Umehara Ryuzaburo, who studied with Renoir, seems to be struggling to take the lines in a reclining nude of Matisse and turn them loose. Indeed, it may have been through Matisse, with his feeling for the East, that Umehara rediscovered Oriental art. Yasui Sotaro, too, indulges in disequilibrium and pleasure. In his 1939 ''Portrait of Mrs. F,'' different members of the School of Paris run together, and lines, colors and shapes seem on the verge of taking off on their own.

Kanokogi Takeshiro's 1933 ''A Torrent of the Yamato Yoshino River'' -almost impossible to see because of reflections on its protective glass - is different. There is realism in the rendering of earth, rocks and not so much a torrential river as a babbling brook. The rocks and earth, however, have an internal energy and anthropomorphism that suggest Japanese brush-and-ink painting. Parisian and Japanese elements are both clear. In a show in which Japan speaks the language of the West, it is only in this work that Paris and Japan seem to have equal voice. Was this in fact so rare, or was the selection for the show intended to appeal to a Western public?

While the exhibition turns a familiar subject on its head, Mr. Rimer does the same with familiar ideas.

For example, as the West looks to the East for a holistic model that can provide an alternative to the fragmentation of Western life, Mr. Rimer writes that the novelist Nagai Kafu (1879-1959) found his holistic model in France. For Nagai, Mr. Rimer says, French civilization had a ''wholeness, a comprehensiveness'' that could give ''resonance to the simplest activities of daily life.'' Nagai felt Japanese wholeness disappeared in what Mr. Rimer describes as a ''rush to amalgamate Eastern and Western experiences.''

It is also useful to learn that in the same century in which many French artists were drawn to the exoticism of the East, many Japanese were drawn to the exoticism of France. For the Japanese, Mr. Rimer says, ''A trip to France was the premier intellectual and spiritual adventure of the period.''

At a time when Westerners are attracted to Oriental art because of its suppression of ego, its commitment to something beyond the self, Mr. Rimer writes that Japanese artists were attracted to precisely the heroic individualism that many Westerners are trying to get away from. They believed that only a heroic effort could deal with the conflicts of the modern world, with its disjunctive relationship between past and present. For the Japanese, Mr. Rimer says, Cezanne and van Gogh were paragons ''that would be needed in Japan if she were to develop her own authentically modern culture.''

And at a time when some Western artists and critics are determined to flagellate anyone who takes what he wants from other cultures without considering context, Mr. Rimer points out that the Japanese took what they wanted from European art, often without having a clue to what it meant. The more freely they borrowed, the more they were able to find roots and set their art free.

In a moment as prone to ideological generalization as this one, this is the kind of show that may make it easier to breathe.

''Paris in Japan'' continues at the Japan Society Gallery, 333 East 47th Street, through Feb. 7. The exhibition was organized by the Japan Foundation in Tokyo and and the Washington University Gallery of Art in St. Louis, where the tour began. The third and last stop is the Wight Art Gallery in Los Angeles. Financing was provided in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A version of this article appears in print on December 25, 1987, on Page C00001 of the National edition with the headline: When 'Japan's Art Opened to Western Winds. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe